Apple Just Hired A 20-Year HP Veteran To Help It Sell More Products To Big Companies

Business Insider Apple has hired John Solomon, a 20-year HP veteran, to help it sell more products to businesses.

Re/code reports that Solomon will focus on enterprises with big technology budgets, and may also be involved in selling the Apple Watch to Asia.

He was a senior VP in HP's Personal Systems Group, which includes printers and PCs.

Apple has been paying a lot more attention to the enterprise over the last year, Apple teamed up with IBM to build iOS apps for businesses last July, and we saw the first apps from that partnership last month. Apple has also reportedly been building out its enterprise sales force.

The business market will be particularly important for the iPad. That's because people are treating iPads much more like PCs than phones, and upgrading them infrequently rather than every two or three years. But Apple may have room to replace some PCs in businesses, or get iPads into the hands of employees like retail floor workers who previously didn't use a PC at all.

The strategy seems to be working: a recent survey of CIOs by Piper Jaffray found that more than half are planning to roll out tablets to workers in 2015.